Memorials for Myself: Roland Burris Edition

The tombstone of Roland Burris, age seventy-one, carries the Illinois state seal and is etched with the words “Trail Blazer,” along with a list of positions held (first African-American Illinois attorney general and state comptroller) and an adjacent stone ranking “Other Major Accomplishments.” It now looks like Burris (Rod Blagojevich’s pick to take Barack Obama’s old job) will get to add “U.S. Senator” to the list.

What kind of man engraves his own memorial while still alive? The kind of man, perhaps, who shows up on his first day at work knowing full well that none of his colleagues want him there, as Burris did on Tuesday, when he was barred from entering the Capitol. Curious about the extent of this kind of self-memorializing, we spoke to the New Yorker cartoonist (and Cartoon Lounge blogger) Drew Dernavich, who has engraved tombstones for the past eighteen years.

Have you ever heard of anything like this: living people who get a jump on their own tombstones?

It’s something that people do, but I’ve never seen something that’s this egocentric. Many people buy their stones ahead of time; the industry term is “pre-need.” People like to buy their stones ahead of time because they want control of it, or they’re worried their kids will mess it up. I’ve actually engraved portraits on tombstones for people who are still alive. But I’ve never seen anything like this. It seems like a résumé.

In Burris’s case, it seems like there’s an element of self-regard, but also, maybe, of comfort with his own mortality. What do you think it says about him?

My reaction when I looked at it was, Yeah, it takes chutzpah. But it also seems paranoid. You can only control so much in this life, and when you die, you die. You shouldn’t try to control your own reputation from beyond the grave. In New England there are a lot of whimsical gravestones, and you can tell that they weren’t vetted by the children or the family. “He was a doctor, but not the best doctor,” or “He had syphilis”—that was the spirit of the epitaphs. But this seems like a very twenty-first-century thing: we have to brand ourselves, even after our deaths. It takes some balls. I’d want to sit down the guy and tell him to chill out.

People sometimes leave behind odd requests for their final rites. Does that ever extend to what they want written on their tombstones?

If you haven’t walked into a cemetery in ten or fifteen years, you might be shocked. I do portraits and pictures on tombstones, and a lot of people want to show off their possessions: they put their house or their car or even their trailer. That’s what they want to be remembered by—that they lived in a ranch house. Or they’ll put their motorcycle, or a winning lottery ticket—there are a lot of winning lottery tickets.

It now looks like Senate Democratic leaders are moving toward seating Burris. Do you think he should go ahead and update his monument?

I think he should set up a Twitter on the monument and update it in real time.